BOOK: Evelyn Waugh, "A Handful of Dust"

The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh. Volume 4: A Handful of Dust. Ed. by H. R. Woudhuysen. Oxford University Press, 2023. 9780198703150. c + 424 pp.

This is Waugh's fourth novel, and a bit longer than the other Waugh books that I've read so far. It is well-written and I enjoyed reading it, but there were also some things I didn't like that much about it. It is not as light-hearted as Waugh's Vile Bodies, which I read earlier this year (see my post about it); there is still humour in it, but it stays more in the background; what satire there is, is more bitter, and overall it is a sad story with an unhappy end.

<spoiler warning>

Tony and Brenda Last are around 30 years old and have been married for some seven years (p. 14). They are rich, but not extremely rich; Tony inherited some £6000 a year (p. 122) and a sprawling, neo-Gothic mid-19th-century country house (whose architecture is everything that the modernists liked to turn up their noses at; p. 11), where he and Brenda live. Paying off the inheritance taxes and maintaining the house, with its staff of 15 servants (p. 28), consumes more than 5/6 of Tony's income (p. 123), and they have to be careful about their other expenses, at least by rich-people standards (early in the book we even find Brenda travelling to London on a third-class train ticket; p. 30). Clearly they are a fairly advanced example of the decline of the traditional British upper class. Tony would be wise to sell the house (Brenda's family used to have a similar one but had sold it some years before), but he is too sentimentally attached to it and to his quiet life there.

Alas, after seven years of marriage, Brenda got bored of it, and I suspect also of their lifestyle; she has a bunch of friends in London, women who seem to be richer than her, and she would probably prefer to live closer to them where there's more things going on. She also finds the country house “all, every bit of it, appallingly ugly” (p. 28); later we see her institute large redecorations in a modern style blatantly at odds with the original spirit of the building (“white chromium plating”, p. 65).

Brenda starts an affair with John Beaver, a man a few years younger than her (and a distant acquaintance of Tony's). You might say that he is a still more advanced case of upper-class decline; we are not told who or what his late father was, but we do see that his mother, Mrs. Beaver, now has to support herself by running a real-estate and interior design business, and that Beaver himself had been to Oxford and then worked in an advertising agency until he lost his job in the great economic crisis. Since then he has been unemployed (which I guess means several years; the novel appeared in 1934); he lives with his mother (in a house “crowded with the unsaleable furniture of two larger houses”, p. 4 — another sign of decline) and sits eagerly by the phone every day, hoping that some friends will invite him to a party or a dinner (as indeed they often do) and thereby provide him a free meal. In short, he is a harmless parasite that I couldn't help feeling more pity than contempt for.

Over the years of their marriage, Tony, as we are told on more than one occasion, “got into a habit of loving and trusting Brenda” (pp. 102, 107), and she takes full advantage of his trusting nature. She persuades him to rent a small flat for her in London, and announces that she will start taking economics classes at the university there. Soon she seems to be spending less time at home than in London, seeing Beaver in her flat or enjoying social life with her friends (all of whom know about the affair and rather approve of it, or at least consider it harmless; they mostly look down on Tony anyway, p. 54). Tony clearly misses her during these increasingly long absences, and it's a testament to his trusting nature — or should we say his naïveté — that at no point does it seem to occur to him to ask her anything about economics, or to ask to see her course materials.

But I suppose it's no use; from what we've seen of their marriage dynamics, even if he did ask, she'd dismiss him with some vague excuse and make him feel guilty for having posed the question at all. For instance, on one occasion, Tony tries to make a surprise visit to her in London, but she simply refuses to see him: “He's got to be taught not to make surprise visits.” (P. 55.) This leads to a funny episode where Tony and a friend get increasingly drunk, keep calling Brenda on the phone and eventually end the night chatting and dancing with two tarts in a nightclub.

At one point Brenda, apparently figuring that Tony would mind her absences less if he had an affair of his own (p. 67), even tries to introduce him to one of her friends, a bizarre creature named Jenny Abdul Akbar, apparently the estranged English wife of some Moroccan grandee. Tony shows no interest in her and the experiment is not a success, but Brenda agrees with the conclusion of another of her friends: “Anyway, this lets you out. You've done far more than most wives would to cheer the old boy up” (p. 76) — because obviously, staying with Tony and not cheating of him is not an option. A good example of the rather bitter sarcasm that is not uncommon in this book.

Tony and Brenda have a son named John Andrew; he is presumably about seven and I have to commend the author for representing the child's manner of speech very convincingly (e.g. see the excited, breathless sentence on p. 42, ll. 1257–63); I found it annoying, just as I probably would if I heard him speak in real life. Brenda doesn't seem to miss her little son very much, but fortunately he has a nanny to look after him. His main interest is riding and fox-hunting, in which he is encouraged by the Lasts' groom, Ben (we see a similar situation in the early parts of Sassoon's Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928) — perhaps Waugh was inspired by that book?).

Then tragedy strikes: John Andrew is killed in what I guess technically counts as a traffic accident, caused by a combination of unfortunate coincidences that nobody is really to blame for. Evidently Brenda's son was the only thing still linking her with Tony;* now she announces that she is moving to London for good and demands a divorce from Tony. Friends advise him to refuse and wait a little, since Brenda is sure to lose interest in Beaver soon enough; but he is disappointed with her and doesn't want her back (p. 121).

[*And not very strongly either. Upon being told that John is dead, Brenda initially takes it to mean John Beaver, her lover, and is actually rather relieved when it turns out to be John Andrew, her son (p. 96). Probably this short but important scene is why the author adopted the otherwise inconvenient idea of giving two characters the same first name.]

This leads to a very curious episode. At that time, divorce was only possible for certain sufficiently good reasons, such as if one partner (but not both; p. lii) had been unfaithful; so Tony has to take a prostitute to a seaside hotel for a weekend and order breakfast in bed so that the hotel staff will be able to testify that they saw him in bed with her. (The fact that Tony and Brenda both agreed on a divorce and colluded to make these arrangements would also, if it became known to the authorities, result in the divorce not being granted; pp. li, 107.)

Initially Brenda and Tony agree that she is to receive £500 a year in alimony, but then, influenced by Beaver and also by her elder brother, Brenda begins to demand £2000 a year, even though she knows that this would force Tony to sell his house. Tony finally realizes how wrong he was to trust her; he decides to leave the country for half a year and then give Brenda the choice between divorce without alimony or no divorce at all.

Tony joins an explorer named Dr. Messinger on an expedition to South America, searching for a lost city deep in the jungles of the Amazon. Eventually their Indian attendants refuse to go any further, insisting that the next tribe are “bad people” (p. 147). Tony and Messinger continue on their own, but then Tony falls sick with fever; Messinger goes on alone, hoping to reach the next village and bring help, but drowns in a boat accident. Tony, more dead than alive, reaches the farm of one Mr. Todd, who nurses him back to health. Todd is illiterate but loves Dickens's novels, so he asks Tony to read them aloud to him every day. Months pass and Tony slowly realizes that he is effectively Todd's prisoner; he can't reach civilization without Todd's help, and Todd clearly intends to keep him there until one of them dies. (He had at least one victim in a similar arrangement years before; p. 178.) At one point a party of Englishmen arrive in search of Tony; but Mr. Todd, either by dint of good luck or by being forewarned of their coming, has arranged for Tony to spend the day drunk and asleep in a nearby Indian village, and has meanwhile convinced the search party that Tony is dead, so that no further rescue attempts are likely to be made and Tony's fate is sealed.

The novel ends with a short epilogue. Beaver seems to have lost interest in Brenda, and has gone to America with his mother (p. 151). Tony has been declared dead; Brenda married his friend Jock, a local MP; and Tony's country house is now in the hands of his cousins, who are just as fond of it as he was, but who have better financial sense than him. They have shrunk the staff to six servants to reduce expenses, and are operating a fur farm to bring in some money; whereby they hope eventually to restore the estate to its former glory.

</spoiler warning>

I've found this novel to be skilfully constructed and there are many things in it; my poor plot summary above is very far from doing it justice. I liked how Waugh often divides the story into fairly short ‘scenes’ (separated by an empty line), resulting in an effect similar to that of a movie. He often uses this to switch between two or more strands of the story, effectively presenting them in parallel (e.g. between Tony in Brazil and the other characters in England).

Another example of a well-constructed scene is the one where Brenda receives the news of her son's death. We hear she has been worrying all day that something might have happened to Beaver, who went on a trip to France (p. 94); meanwhile, Brenda is at a party with a number of her women friends, and at the moment she is having her fortune told from her foot, by what you might call a ‘sole reader’ or a ‘podomantist’ as opposed to a ‘palm reader’ or ‘cheiromantist’. Brenda seems to be taking the podomantist's ominous pronouncements (“Four men dominate your fate” etc.; p. 95) at least half seriously. When her session is over and Jock shows up to tell her that John is dead, she initially thinks it's John Beaver and not John Andrew: “ ‘John . . . John Andrew . . . I . . . Oh thank God . . .’ Then she burst into tears.” (P. 96.) I guess she is herself shocked at her expression of relief that it is her son that got killed, and not her lover. And at the end of that scene, we hear the podomantist telling the fortune of the next woman, *saying the exact same things that she said to Brenda*.

I liked Waugh's attention to little details that show the sentiments of his characters. At one point Brenda invites a bunch of her women friends to spend the weekend at her and Tony's country house. Tony, following his usual Sunday morning custom, buys carnations for all the ladies to wear in their buttonholes. The guests head back to London early on that same day, trashtalking Tony's house and commiserating with Brenda who has to live there: “ ‘My poor Brenda,’ said Veronica, unpinning her carnation and throwing it from the window into the side of the road.” (P. 67.) You can't help feeling that Tony, his whole lifestyle and everything he holds dear, are being thrown away in just the same careless, contemptuous manner.

Another thing I liked about this novel is the abundance of interesting minor characters. I particularly liked Revd. Tendril, the local vicar (p. 25; or rector?, p. 75) whose services Tony attends on Sunday mornings (though Tony isn't really religious himself and is only doing it out of a sense of tradition; you might say he is sort of LARPing how a traditional country squire is supposed to act). Tendril started his career as a military chaplain in India some thirty-odd years before and has been recycling the exact same sermons ever since, complete with references to “our dear ones far away” and “our Gracious Queen Empress in whose service we are here” (p. 25; confusing some of his audience, who do not quite realize that he's talking about Victoria). Another interesting minor character is Mrs. Rattery, a friend of Jock's, who at one point visits Tony's country house by flying her own airplane and landing it in a nearby park (p. 79).

*

Speaking of religion, apparently it holds a greater significance in the novel than meets the eye of a naive reader like me. We read in the editor's introduction (long and interesting, as always in this series) that “Waugh is deeply critical of Tony's taste and of his morals” (p. liv), e.g. because “Tony's church attendance is merely a social rite” (p. lv); later the editor summarizes Waugh's views thus: “Man without religion will seek after strange and false gods (fortune-telling, psychoanalysis, economics, lost cities); these will fail him, and he will find himself in a world where nothing makes sense. Good in the world can only derive from God, and without religion, man is ‘either bestial or a child’.” (P. lx.)

This may well be how Waugh saw things, but from the perspective of a non-religious person like me, this line of thinking seems completely incomprehensible. It is true that the world makes no sense, but what good does it do to make up a fictional answer to your questions? And surely it is obvious that plenty of people without religion somehow manage to be not much more bestial, nor much more childish, and not even much less good, than religious people are. And moreover, even if Tony had been genuinely religious rather than merely performing it as a social rite, what good would that have done him? How would it have prevented the fact that he and Brenda are incompatible in terms of how they want to live, and that therefore their marriage is doomed to fall apart or, if persisted in despite their incompatibilities, make at least one of them, and possibly both, deeply miserable? If Tony were religious, his marriage would still fail, his wife would still despise his beloved house, and her friends would still look down on him as a stuffy old square.

So perhaps for Waugh this novel was about the lack of religion in modern man's life, but for me it's first and foremost a sad story of incompatibility. How unfortunate it is that it took Tony and Brenda seven years of marriage to discover that one of them wants to live a quiet life in his ponderous neo-Gothic house, putting on the role of a country squire, while the other wants to stay in London and flit from party to party in an endless merry-go-round of socializing with her friends! Neither of these two things is bad in itself, it's just that people with such different tastes can't very well live together without being unhappy.

*

The thing that bothers me the most about this novel is how hard it is on Tony, and unfairly so. He hasn't really done anything bad as far as we can see, and yet he loses everything — his son, his marriage, and ultimately his life. In terms of Tony's circumstances, the whole novel is a story of non-stop decline. His Amazonian expedition, too, is in some sense a matter of non-stop decline: at first, Tony and Messinger travel with a group of (English-speaking) Guyanan blacks; then with a group of Indians, with whom it is nearly impossible to communicate; then it's just the two of them; and finally Tony is left alone. And then, when Tony gets into captivity under Mr. Todd, Waugh positively toys with his fate like a cat with a mouse: he was so close to getting rescued, and yet in the end he is as good as buried alive. And back at home, nobody particularly sympathizes with him or has any real appreciation of the sort of lifestyle that he would like to lead.

The only thing that prevents the end of the book from being a total and unmitigated disaster is the fact that Tony's cousin who inherits his house cares about it much like Tony did, and intends to preserve and restore it. And, dare I say, there is just a tiny glimmer of hope even for Tony. We do not, after all, leave him at the end of the book in any worse a state than he had been in for the past many months as an unwilling guest of Mr. Todd. He managed to hand a message to a passing prospector once (p. 178); conceivably a similar opportunity could occur again, and lead to a renewed rescue attempt. Moreover, Todd is almost sixty years old (p. 171), so it is only a matter of time before he dies or falls seriously ill, and the influence which he exerts over the local Indians (p. 177) could then cease and Tony might be able to get them to make him a boat. We do not know much about Mr. Todd's security arrangements but they do not seem to be very high; so it also seems possible to me that Tony might at some point attack and overpower Todd, perhaps get access to his gun, and then threaten Todd and/or the local Indians into helping him. I suspect that Waugh wouldn't think highly of any of these probabilities, but I at any rate am not willing to write off Tony completely just yet.

Interesting things from the editor's introduction

There's an interesting section on real-life influences on this or that element of the novel. For example, Waugh's first wife left him for a man named John, and Brenda in the novel also leaves her husband for a man named John (Beaver) — probably not a coincidence (pp. l, lx). And apparently Waugh himself said that the dog owned by Brenda's sister in the novel is based on a real dog owned by Phyllis de Janzé (pp. lxii–lxiii) — who, incidentally, was the English sister-in-law of Frédéric de Janzé, the author of two books which we encountered on the pages of this blog before (Vertical Land and Tarred with the Same Brush).

But the most interesting result of real-world influence on the novel, in my opinion, is the whole Amazonian episode. In fact it came as a complete surprise to me; when Tony and Brenda's divorce negotiations founder, there was nothing in the book up to that point which could lead one to expect that Tony would suddenly go on an expedition into the jungles of South America (indeed it comes as a result of a chance meeting in one of Tony's clubs; p. 132). Obviously, Waugh was inspired to send Tony to that part of the world because he himself had travelled into the interior of Guiana in 1933 (and described the trip in a travel book, Ninety-Two Days; see my post about it from last year).

Many little details in the Amazonian episode of the novel are based on Waugh's experiences from that journey; for instance, foodstuffs such as farine and tasso (p. 178), or the drinks cassiri (p. 144) and piwari (p. 179), the preparation of which involves chewing on cassava root and spitting it into a bowl; even the mechanical mice with which Dr. Messinger hopes to win over the uncooperative Indians (p. 156) — all these things were already mentioned in Ninety-Two Days. The character of Mr. Todd was inspired by one Mr. Christie (pp. lxxiv, 422), a reclusive rancher and bizarre religious fanatic whom Waugh described in chapter 3 of Ninety-Two Days.

Waugh also took some inspiration from Peter Fleming's journey to Brazil in 1932 (p. lviii–lix), which Fleming described in articles in The Times and then in his book, Brazilian Adventure (1933; see my recent post about it).

And Dr. Messinger and his quest for a lost city in the Amazonian jungle were surely inspired by Percy Fawcett, the famous explorer who disappeared in 1925 while on a quest for just such a city. But I have to admit that Messinger struck me as being more of a scientific type (at least he has a doctorate), while Fawcett was more purely an adventurer (and a military officer by occupation).

But I was shocked and almost hurt by this remark from the editor's introduction: “Fawcett's lack of experience, competence, and common sense is matched by Dr Messinger's; both share messianic tendencies and are, like the leader of the expedition in Fleming's Brazilian Adventure, Major Pingle, essentially frauds and untrustworthy.” (P. lix.) Now, it has been almost twenty years since I read Exploration Fawcett, Fawcett's posthumous autobiography edited by his surviving younger son; but surely, he had been on numerous expeditions into the interior of South America prior to that fateful one in 1925, and he impressed people by his ability to traverse difficult terain quickly while still drawing good-quality maps, to say nothing of his seeming imperviousness to tropical diseases. To say that such a man lacked experience and competence strikes me as completely bizarre. [But see this 2017 article, which suggests that he may have actually been a good deal less competent than I thought.] Nor was he a fraud; by all accounts he sincerely believed in the lost city he was looking for (and, let's not forget, he was willing to stake his life on it) — he may have been badly wrong about that city, but he was no fraud.

And for that matter, I didn't get the impression that Dr. Messinger in the novel is inexperienced or incompetent either, just the contrary in fact; and he struck me as no fraud, but honest in his quest, just as Fawcett had been; my only complaint about Messinger is that he is perhaps a tad too optimistic in his plans. It is shameful to compare these two honest people, the fictional Dr. Messinger and the real Col. Fawcett, to Major Pingle, who really was untrustworthy, for he deliberately lied to Fleming for weeks about his willingness to search for traces of Fawcett's expedition in otherwise unexplored territory (and not just to lead a casual shooting and fishing party).

Incidentally, the whole idea of Tony becoming a sort-of prisoner of Mr. Todd bears a distant resemblance to some of the theories that were being floated in the 1920s or 30s about Fawcett's fate, as people claimed that he was still alive as a captive of the Indians, or perhaps that he became a sort of cult leader amongst them. But I think that Waugh's idea is far more interesting and original than any of those theories. Anyone can imagine Fawcett becoming a captive of the Indians; but to imagine Tony becoming the captive of an illiterate, reclusive rancher with an obsession of having someone read Dickens's novels aloud to him — that takes some real creativity. My hat's off to Waugh for coming up with that one.

*

The editor's introduction also has an interesting account of the publication history of the novel, and I couldn't help but be impressed by how Waugh tried to get as much use out of his material as he could. His trip to Guiana was the basis of his travel book, Ninety-Two Days; it also inspired a short story, “The Man Who Liked Dickens” (which he actually wrote during the journey itself, in Brazil; p. 402), which appeared in Cosmopolitan (p. xxxiii; it's in the September 1933 issue)* and in Nash's—Pall Mall Magazine (pp. .403–4; in the November 1933 issue). Waugh then reused this short story, with some minor changes, as a chapter in A Handful of Dust (about Tony's captivity with Mr. Todd). The material about Tony's and Dr. Hessinger's expedition is mostly new in the novel, however; in the short story that part is dealt with very briefly. (An interesting difference: instead of Dr. Hessinger there is a Prof. Anderson and he dies of malaria rather than in a boat accident.)

[*Waugh grumbled to his agent: “If those Americans wrongly called Cosmopolitan take it there must be no monkeying with the text.” :)) (P. xxxvi.)]

Moreover, before the novel was published as a book, a slightly earlier version of it was serialized in Harper's Bazaar under the title “A Flat in London” (p. xxxvi). However, the chapter that had previously appeared in Cosmopolitan and Nash's couldn't be included here, because of copyright reasons, so Waugh wrote a new and happier ending in which Tony and Brenda apparently get reconciled (ibid.)! This alternative ending was later included as an appendix in the fourth British edition of A Handful of Dust, but, to my disappointment, it is not included in the present volume; apparently it will be published in vol. 5 (pp. xlix, lxxxvii, 414). The same volume will also include the original version of “The Man Who Liked Dickens” (p. xxxiii).

Nevertheless the present volume does include a couple of interesting appendices: there's one with illustrations from the serialization of the novel in Harper's Bazaar (pp. 414–17) and one with a preface which Waugh wrote for the 1964 reprint of the novel (p. 422) and in which he explains his inspiration for the character of Mr. Todd.

Miscellaneous

Waugh supposedly said that “anyone could write a novel given six weeks, pen, paper and no telephone or wife.” (Pp. xlix–l.)

Waugh apparently thought that flats “were essentially un-English” and that the English people have a “love of own front door”; flats were also seen as “a sign of the isolation of modern urban life” (p. xlvi). It's not that I disagree with any of that — I think that ideally every human settlement should look like Hobbiton at the start of the first Lord of the Rings movie — but considering how many people there are nowadays, and how many of them have to live in cities, it's inevitable that most of them will end up in flats.

Tony's butler, Albert, says “clucking like a 'en” on p. 92. I was intrigued by this; I guess it means that when people drop an h at the start of a word, the article a before it does not change into an even if it is now followed by a vowel; the dropped h still exerts a sort of posthumous influence.

One reviewer complained that Waugh's literature is too formulaic: “Waugh, he said, ‘has mixed one of his usual literary cocktails. His recipe is as follows:—One-quarter Ernest Hemingway, one-quarter Michael Arlen, one-quarter Anthony Powell, one-eighth crude caricatures of London personalities, one-eight local colour (tropical for preference). Add a catchphrase, stir to a light froth, and serve very cool.’ ” (P. lxix.) Nevertheless the novel “was clearly a great success” in Britain (p. lxiv), though less so in America (p. lxix).

Brenda reading the newspaper (p. 13): “Two more chaps in gas ovens. . .” I didn't realize that this was such a common method of suicide. Perhaps it is a nod to one of Waugh's previous novels, Vile Bodies, where Lord Balcairn commits suicide in this way?

Brenda complains of the many people involved in maintaining their country house: “[...] odd little men constantly popping in to wind the clocks and cook the accounts and clean the moat, [...]” (p. 28). I love how cooking the accounts is included so casually in that list :) Interestingly, it was omitted from the serialization in the U.S. edition of Harper's Bazaar (p. 263).

Tony and Jock having a chat with two tarts (p. 60): “ ‘What d'you do?’ / ‘I design postmen's hats,’ said Jock. / ‘Oh, go on.’ / ‘And my friend here trains sea lions.’ ” :))

A few interesting instances of racial terminology: Brenda says that Jenny Abdul Akbar is “[n]ot black but married one” (p. 68) — her husband was actually a Moroccan nobleman and surely an Arab rather than what we would call a black now; so I guess this shows that in Waugh's time the word ‘black’ was applied more widely. (Jenny describes her husband and his men as “pure Semitic type” on p. 71, contrasting this with “negroes”.) Later in the book, when Tony and Dr. Messinger travel with a group of actual blacks (from Guiana), they are referred to as “niggers” on p. 144 (ll. 594, 615), but “negroes” on p. 147 (l. 746).

Seven-year-old John Andrew is quite fascinated by Jenny. “ ‘Back to bed,’ she said, ‘or I shall spank you.’ / ‘Would you do it hard? I should't mind.’ ” :))) (P. 72.)

Tony has to take a prostitute to Brighton to provide fake evidence of infidelity for the divorce; but his lawyer tells of an even more bizarre case: “Lately we had a particularly delicate case involving a man of very rigid morality and a certain indifference. In the end his own wife consented to go with him and supply the evidence. She wore a red wig. It was quite successful.” (P. 107.) On a related note, another lawyer says later: “Judges in their more lucid moments sometimes wonder why perfectly respectable, happily married men go off for weekends to the seaside with women they do not know.” (P. 119.) Still, it seems that for the most part this silly stratagem worked to get people the divorce they wanted.

“England was east of America so he and Dr. Messinger got the sun later. It came to them at second hand and slightly soiled” (p. 143). Ewww, what an image :))

I learned from the notes (p. 198) that the name Daisy is a “[l]ate 19th-century form of Margaret”. I hadn't thought of that, but it makes sense, because the equivalent of “Margaret” is used as the word for a daisy (the flower) in many other languages (it seems to have started in French).

Interesting: Waugh had a habit of mentioning the same minor characters in several of his books, e.g. Margot, Lady Metroland (p. 201), or Lord Monomark (p. 227, which also explains the etymology: a monomark was “a short alphanumeric sequence used in place of a postal address” (wiktionary)).

“Make love” in its older sense, which we already encountered in one of Waugh's other books, appears again here (p. 36); the note on p. 203 adds: “the more modern and, initially US, sense of having sex with someone is first recorded by OED in 1927”.

I was interested to learn, from a note on p. 208, that the name Jenny “is a variation of Jane and popular in the 19th century”, although we think of it as a variant of Jennifer nowadays. But what is really strange is that the note says it is “correctly pronounced ‘Jinny’ ”. Maybe if you're a New Zealander... Neither the wikpedia nor the wiktionary nor the OED suggest that it should be pronounced with /ɪ/.

Interestingly, Waugh spells “Thibetan” with an h (p. 93). The note on p. 213 says that this spelling “remained current at least until the 1960s”. However, some editions of the novel use “Tibetan”: the serialization in the British Harper's Bazaar, the reprint in the Albatross Modern Continental Library (1935), and the Penguin edition of 1951 (p. 328). According to Google n-grams, the h-less forms were more common since at least the late 19th century. I suspect that the Th spelling started in an effort to indicate aspiration /tʰ/, perhaps in French, where this might well have made sense; but in English, where such a T is inevitably aspirated anyway, the presence of the h probably causes more harm than good, as it might mislead some people into pronouncing it with /θ/ instead.

I learnt a new word from p. 139: fête, which is the same as a name-day. But it seems to be more French than English.

Honi soit qui mal y pense: “In Guiana, he [i.e. Waugh] traded a Woolworth necklace for a black cock” (p. 226).

Interesting things from the critical apparatus

We've encountered the abbreviation 'ld (for would) instead of 'd in Waugh before (in Vile Bodies), and here it appears again in Waugh's manuscript (p. 287), though not in any printed edition of this novel.

On a few (but only a few) occasions the critical apparatus contains interesting additional material that did not make it into the final version of the novel. See e.g. the additional information about the Old Hundredth club on pp. 289–90 (note to 58.210–12); and their supposed fancy champagne was actually “distilled upstairs by the youngest Miss Weybridge” (p. 291, note to 58.233–59.235).

When Jenny says to the Revd. Tendril: “I could see from your sermon that you knew the East, Rector. [. . .] It has an uncanny fascination, hasn't it?” (p. 75), in early versions of the text the priest replied: “It had—before your day, young lady. You used to meet some of the finest types there. But it's not a white man's country any more.” (P. 307.)

At one point, when Tony and Messinger fail to get the local Indians to tell them the name of the rivers they have crossed, there are a few more lines of conversation between them in the first U.S. edition, but not in the British ones (p. 375, note to 150.856–7). They are not of any great importance, but I still don't see why Waugh thought it necessary to remove them.

Errors

This volume seems to have much fewer errors than some of the earlier ones in this series.

• The comma after “In,” at the start of n. 112, p. lxiv, is redundant.
• “Boa Visa” at the top of p. lxxiv should be “Boa Vista”.
• On p. 196 (note to 16.196), there is a semicolon after “slang)”, but it should be a comma.
• On p. 214 (note to 94.1635) there is a comma instead of a full-stop at the end of the sentence (after “Berkshire”).

But the printers have to be commended on the good job on “İzmir” (p. 222), which is a marked improvement from the embarrassing failure of “I˙zmit” in Helena (p. 133). :)